THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 22, 2014 73
o ces of Ms., in the spring of 1972. She
was nearly eighty, as pale as paper and as
thin as bone. In Virginia, where she was
living with Olive Byrne, who was six-
ty-eight, she'd got a letter from Joanne
Edgar, telling her that Ms. was planning
to run a cover story about Wonder
Woman. Holloway flew to New York.
She met the magazine's writers and edi-
tors and artists. "All were on the young
side, very much in earnest," she reported
to Marjorie Wilkes Huntley. "I told
them I was 100% with them in what
they are trying to do and to 'charge
ahead!' " Huntley sent in a money order
for a subscription, signing herself, at the
age of eighty-two, "Marjorie Wilkes
Huntley (Ms.)."
But Holloway never told Edgar, or
anyone else, about Olive Byrne. In
1974, when a Berkeley Ph.D. student
writing a dissertation about Wonder
Woman asked Holloway about Won-
der Woman's bracelets, Holloway re-
plied in a letter, "A student of Dr. Mar-
ston's wore on each wrist heavy, broad
silver bracelets, one African and the
other Mexican. They attracted his at-
tention as symbols of love binding so
that he adopted them for the Wonder
Woman strip." The bracelets were
Olive Byrne's. Olive Byrne had at that
point been living with Holloway for
forty-eight years.
At the beginning of 1972, when the
editors of Ms. were planning their
Wonder Woman issue, the women's
movement seemed on the verge of last-
ing success. On March 22, 1972, the
Equal Rights Amendment passed the
Senate, nearly a half century after it had
been introduced. In June, Congress also
passed Title IX, assuring that "No per-
son in the United States shall, on the
basis of sex, be excluded from participa-
tion in, be denied the benefits of, or be
subjected to discrimination under any
education program or activity receiving
federal financial assistance." The year
1972 was a legislative watershed. "We
put sex-discrimination provisions into
everything," Bella Abzug said. "There
was no opposition. Who'd be against
equal rights for women?"
A lot of people. In 1972, Wonder
Woman was named a "Symbol of Femi-
nist Revolt"; the next year, the Supreme
Court legalized abortion. But the after-
math of Roe v. Wade didn't bolster the
feminist movement; it narrowed it. If
1972 was a legislative watershed, 1973
marked the beginning of a drought. The
movement stalled. Wages never reached
parity; social and economic gains were
rolled back; political and legal victories
seemingly within sight were never
achieved. Then, too, the movement was
divided, bitterly and viciously, radicals at-
tacking liberals and liberals attacking
radicals. In May, 1975, the Redstockings
held a press conference and issued a six-
teen-page report purporting to reveal
that Gloria Steinem was a C.I.A. agent,
that Ms. was both a capitalist manifesto
and part of a C.I.A. strategy to destroy
the women's movement, and that Won-
der Woman was a symbol of nothing so
much as feminism betrayed. "Wonder
Woman also reflects the anti-people at-
titude of the 'liberal feminists' and matri-
archists who look to mythical and super-
natural heroines and 'models' while
ignoring or denigrating the achieve-
ments and struggles of down-to-earth
women," they charged. "It leads to the
'liberated woman,' individualist line that
denies the need for a movement, and im-
plies that when women don't make it, it's
their own fault."Steinem rebutted the al-
legations. "Although it seems bizarre to
have to write this obvious sentence," she
wrote, "let me state that I am not now
nor have I ever been an employee of the
Central Intelligence Agency."
Wonder Woman ran for President
in a comic book written by Marston in
1943; she ran for President on the cover
of Ms. in 1972. She'll run again; she's
never won. The Equal Rights Amend-
ment never became law; in 1982, the
deadline for its ratification expired. A
century after Sanger started The Woman
Rebel, even the fight for birth control
isn't over.
Last March, I went to see "Captain
America: The Winter Soldier," with
Byrne Holloway Marston. He's named
for all three of his parents. He's eighty-
three. He's a retired obstetrician. He's also
a movie bu . He's optimistic about Gal
Gadot, though he thinks that Jennifer
Lawrence would have made a tip-top
Wonder Woman. "She's good enough to
soften it up," he says.
Captain America and Wonder Woman
are about the same age. He made his
début in 1940. They've aged di erently,
the Boy Scout and the bombshell. Captain
America is so hard to update that Marvel
decided to have him frozen in 1945 and
awakened in 2011. A guy he meets while
out for a run on the Washington Mall asks
him what's di erent about now versus
1945. "No polio is good," he says.
Warner Bros. is unlikely to release a film
in which Wonder Woman is frozen in time
in 1941, in order to call attention to what's
changed for women, and what's not, when
she's defrosted. She'd have to take stock, and
what could she say about what women have
got? Breast pumps and fetal rights instead
of paid maternity leave and equal rights?
Longer hours instead of equal pay? Aphro-
dite, aid me! Lean in? Are you kidding?
Batman vs. Superman? Su ering Sappho.
Sitting in the dark, I asked Byrne Mar-
ston what he thought he would do if he
were writing Wonder Woman into the
script for "Dawn of Justice."
"God, I don't know," he said. He
stretched out his legs. "I'd go back to the
origins."
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